I missed it. The Speech. I had to catch it a few hours later. It was my daughter's birthday and we were looking for ice cream. Our favorite spot, Sweet Occasions, abruptly closed both locations in Andersonville and Ravenswood. Bustling business, but the high price of sugar, energy and supplies permanently shut their doors. We wound up at the Wicker Park Oberweis (figures that a ultra right wing Republican could keep the doors open as others go down the tubes) and made it home in time to see Mr. Obama waving goodbye and being greeted by his family and Mr. Biden.
It's been one helluva year for me, and a slew of Chicagoans and other Americans. This Labor Day has been a bittersweet one. I have been unemployed for five months now. I came close to foreclosure and am still treading water. Fall makes me cautiously optimistic; the phone began to ring last week with the promise of job interviews at the end of the line.
But boy oh boy, does Mr. Obama get "it;" he's actually lived "it." More than listening to mere confessionals, he watched his dying mother wrestle insurance companies to get her treatments paid for. He's been underemployed and held the bill collectors at bay. He watched helplessly with the rest of us as New Orleans drowned while a government that we pay to save us when in need practiced their high-ignorant brand of cronyism and corruption with all the glee of the Medici, sans the compassion and optimism.
When I was a kid in Oklahoma, following the assassination of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy, our social studies teacher told us the story of President Roosevelt's corn flakes initiative. According to Mrs. Milne, FDR invented the New Deal after he read in the newspaper of a man imprisoned for stealing corn flakes to feed his family. "No man should have to steal in the greatest country in the world to feed his family," FDR supposedly said. Truth or mythology (and I can't find any verification that FDR ever said those words), it makes for a great American story, don't it? A chief executive in hard times understands what America is, and with a visionary's pragmatism, redirects a literally starving and demoralized nation to its former greatness. A commander-in-chief who actually reads a newspaper, sincerely acknowledges Americans in pain, and takes chivalrous steps to alleviate the pain. What a concept.
For the past eight years it has been as if Connie Corleone, acting as Bush surrogate, slipped a tainted canoli to each of us daily, rendering us too weak to reason with or fight against the poisonous regime.
The Speech was Mr. Obama's corn flakes moment, mammon for a starving nation waiting for words of circumstantial acknowledgment. I was profoundly moved by Mr. Obama words, but I didn't cry my false eyelashes off. It's not that The Speech didn't warrant streaming tears, but my budget is tighter than a pair of drawers on the circus fat man, and I'm using mascara sparingly.
His supporters are well aware that Mr. Obama is not the Second Coming, as some cynics and critics mockingly dub him. But he is the paradigm shift that this nation needs and his words represent the winds of revitalization. Win or lose, come November, he has changed The Game, he has changed how campaigns will be financed, run and personally conducted. Dare I say he has brought back a little integrity to the American politic.
Mr. Obama's speech will resonate for the ages, and no one will have to Google to separate fact from mythology. McCain's ilk picking some barren wasteland former beauty contestant cow, be damned. Nowhere close did his Palin-pick upstage The Speech that will inspire and set the aspirations of liberals, moderates and conservatives alike, for generations to come. By the way, Mrs. Palin lost the Miss Alaska contest to a black woman. And in Alaska, a place that has several times more polar bears than black people, you'd think Mrs. Palin would have had the "in", especially a contest held in the middle of the Reagan years. Then, there are Mrs. Palin's, er, "personal family matters", confusing patriotic affiliations, backwater land grab deals and her co-sponsorship of that bridge with the indicted Senator Stevens. But I digress - blown off course by a misdirected Alaskan Clipper. Time to get back on track.
The Speech. The resonance of hope, acknowledgment and promise, moving all of us upward and onward. We will never be the same -- and in a good way.
Thank you, Mr. Obama. The world awaits you. You have the floor.